SysAd Blog

I've recently contributed a couple of posts to My SysAd Blog, which has prompted a bit of curiosity about me.

Here is my bio brief:

I'm the Network Security Administrator for a university in Texas.
My technology career began in the mid 1980's
My first operating system was a AT&T Unix on a 3b2.
I've worked with a variety of Unix/Linux systems (SCO,Solaris,BSDi,Ultrix,HPux and various Linux).
I had my 5 minutes of fame in 2000 when I wrote a paper for my SANS GIAC certification detailing the SANS top 10 report (it was originally only ten). My paper broke down the top ten, explaining how to know if your running the service, how to know if you need the service and how to disable it. My paper was translated to several languages and posted on web sites around the world. Someone even posted it on the alt.hackers newsgroup.
Today, SANS includes much of this information in their annual Top 20 list. I suspect they were inspired by my format, but I was never told that.

I'm looking forward to retirement in 7 years. I recently started making jewelry. I've got links in this blog to my jewelry site. I don't sell online, but I might one day.

jewelrybychaddock.com

I finally got my web site up and running. You can view my necklaces and pricelist at http://www.jewelrybychaddock.com . I'm not set up for online purchases. But if I get any requests, I may consider doing it.

Making Necklaces

I started making necklaces (aka beading) a few weeks ago. I absolutely *love* it!
The only problem is I now have lots of necklaces and want to make more. This means I've got to sell some to make money to buy more beads to make more! And I'm no salesman!! I don't have one sales DNA... um.. thing in my entire body!

Despite my inadequacies, I've actually sold 3 necklaces. But I drastically under priced them and wound up losing money. It's still a start.

I started scanning my necklaces and publishing them in my Picasa Web Album.
I've only got a few done, but within the next few days I should have them all. I'm actually calculating the real cost of each necklace and putting the price with the picture, that way I won't be caught off guard and utter out a ridiculously low price. I'm not really trying to sell anything on the web. The main reason I'm publising the pictures is to show my co-workers and friends. It's alot easier than carrying them around with me all the time.

Splitting a large disk image.

The Problem: You have a disk image (or any file) that is too big to write to a DVD.

The Solution: Split the image file into smaller files that you can save to multiple DVDs.

To Split the file:

$ cat mydisk.dd |gzip -c| split -a 3 -d -b 4500m - mydisk.dd

To restore, use a command similar to the following:

$ cat mydisk.dd.* | gzip -dc| dd of=/outdir/mydisk.dd